Sunday, June 13, 2010

Three BeagleBoard Accessories

The best things in life come in 3’s.

Red Bull. Espresso. Diet Coke.

Ramen noodles. Triple Threat Powerbars. Dunkin Donuts Breakfast sandwiches - the one with ham and cheese, not the nasty sausage patty thing that reminds me of the last time I threw up every time I bite into one :)

This was an obvious one, ever since Sean wrote me an email almost a year ago, saying, I should build one of these… except that at the time I was building the Illuminato X Machina, so I was a bit pre- occupied. But here it is: a 4.3” touchscreen OLED display that snaps right on to the Beagle Board.

I wish I could take credit for the name, but I owe it to a little girl who came up to me at Maker Faire, and saw my BeagleBoard, and said, “that sounds like a beetle board, like a bug”. Beetle Board -> Beetle -> Power -> Juice -> BeetleJuice -> BeagleJuice! By the name, the BeagleJuice is a battery backpack the powers the BeagleBoard and its peripherals for up to 6 hours.

Modders and hackers like Chris and Mike and Justin (and me?) like having stuff to stack and solder random sensors to, so this board does the trick during prototyping. It’s not the fanciest board I’ve ever built, but it stacks nicely under the Beagle Board, and is enough to wire up an accelerometer, temp sensor, or such…